Traditionally, business cards have simply included information about the business card holder in printed form. More recently, it has become desirable to ensure that business card information can be easily transferred to the digital domain for use in electronic contact databases and similar electronic systems.
One solution is to scan-in the printed information on the business cards. However, if the digitised information is to be used effectively, such information needs to be interpreted and organised, especially if that information is to be searchable. Despite tools such as Optical Character Recognition, this method is very time consuming and error-prone.
Accordingly, to facilitate the transfer of business card information into the digital domain, a better solution is to enhance a conventional business card with explicit digital information. A 2-D barcode or other easily machine-readable glyph can be printed onto the card and used to provide digital information directly and/or provide a link (such as a URI) to a source of linked information. However, 2-D barcodes occupy valuable real-estate on the business card and can spoil the appearance of the business card making this solution less than ideal.
A more powerful approach that has been recently proposed is to provide a wireless communication chip, such as a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, on the business card. NFC provides a set of short-range wireless technologies operating at 13.56 MHz according to a group of standards developed under the guidance of the NFC Forum. NFC chips are commercially available from a number of vendors. The NFC chip holds the relevant digital information, and this information can be very quickly transferred and processed. Furthermore, the information can be semantically structured, and so can be quickly and correctly merged into an electronic database.
NFC-enabled business cards have been proposed by a number of manufacturers. For example, Hicel produces a plastics material card with an integrated NFC chip and antenna. Nokia (http://www.nfc-hub.com) produces a paper card with an NFC tag sandwiched between two plies of paper. However, the manufacture of existing NFC-enabled business cards is expensive, inflexible and time-consuming. Furthermore, the incorporation of an NFC chip often detracts from the appearance and quality of high-grade business cards.
Accordingly, it is desirable to produce a paper-based business card which has NFC or other wireless capability while retaining in all practical respects the properties of a high-grade business card stock. It is also desirable to be able to produce and personalise such cards in volume, and to be able to use their enhanced capabilities to achieve new uses.
In particular, it is desirable to be able to produce NFC-enabled business cards which can be printed effectively with a digital press (for example, one of the digital presses in the HP Indigo product family). This is so as to enable manufacturing at high speed, high print quality and with sheet-to-sheet customisation.
It is against this background that the present invention has been conceived.